Clearly eating all day and night is not good for your waistline, and neither is eating cake or potato chips throughout the day.
Scientists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the South-Eastern region of the US think that if someone wants to lose weight and chooses to go on a diet, then if they eat only between 7am and 3pm the weight will come off and body fat will be shed.
The boffins recruited 90 obese individuals and stuck them on a 14-week diet, with half also told they could only eat for eight hours a day between 7am and 3pm.
They all received expert guidance on how to follow a diet, and were told to adhere to it for at least six days a week and exercise for between 75 and 150 minutes a week.
Lead author Humaira Jamshed found that people who stopped eating at 3pm lost 6.35kg over 14 weeks, while the control group lost only about 4kg.
“The effects of (time-restricted eating and calorie restriction) were equivalent to reducing calorie intake by an additional 214 calories per day,” she wrote in the study paper, published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The results revealed blood pressure was improved because of fasting, along with the moods of the participants.
“We found that (early time-restricted eating) was acceptable for many patients. About 41 per cent of completers in the control group planned to continue practising (early time-restricted eating) after the study concluded,” she wrote.
The positive findings are not yet enough to conclusively rule that intermittent fasting is a good thing.
It might be a bit hard for all of us, of course – the first one to open the door at home is about 5:30pm.
